


Personal Loyalty and Disregard for Protocol

by ChibiSquirt



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, M/M, outsider pov, side-fic to The Prize
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-30 14:58:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11465979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChibiSquirt/pseuds/ChibiSquirt
Summary: King Tony woke up the morning after the concubine came at actually the same time as he usually did.





	Personal Loyalty and Disregard for Protocol

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Prize](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11314392) by [sabrecmc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabrecmc/pseuds/sabrecmc). 



> Thank you Sabre for letting me play with your fic! 
> 
> This was going to be a longer fic, but some of it got jossed, so I snipped and saved what was salvageable. Posted without beta for much the same reason.

Josiah and Peran were both very good at what they did; no question about that.  But that was about where the similarities ended.

Josiah’s interests were as varied as the sands; Peran cared about only three things—four, if one counted his infatuation with that actress, the one who played the queen in the dramas by the market.  Josiah was shy, Peran more sociable; but once you got close and became his friend, Josiah would babble about anything that crossed his mind, while Peran retained a reserve and a sense of dignity even with his intimates.  

And another thing...  Josiah broke rules.   _All.  The.  Time._  Brown belt instead of regulation black, or an extra blade strapped to his ankle, out late or up early...  he really considered rules to be more of _suggestions,_ was the thing, and as long as they were _mostly_ followed, he didn’t think anyone was suffering by an exception here and there.

Peran...  Well, he didn’t exactly agree.  

The word “stickler” had occasionally been thrown out, and not only by Josiah.

It was what made them a good team, though, especially for a protection detail; Peran would focus on the target—in this case, the King—and Josiah would watch the room, unobtrusively, noting all the little details and, particularly, monitoring those who came to see the King.

Basically, they had stopped an assassination attempt within a week of being assigned, and ever since then they’d been the King’s primary guardians for the hours from supper til breakfast—whenever that might be.  

On occasion, the King would sleep late—he was, after all, only human—and when he did sleep late, he slept very, _very_ late, until long after most folks had sought their mid-day meals.  But that was the exception, not the rule, and usually, it was the opposite.  

Today was one of those more normal ones:  the King was awake, dressing in a robe suitable for receiving those visitors whose business was best conducted before breakfast, and striding towards his inner sanctum, the work room, well before the sun had risen.  His face was blank, but twitching, as exactly if he had an ant on his leg which was biting him at periodic intervals, but he was trying not to stamp or swat.  Something was eating him, in other words.  Josiah nodded to Tom at the outer door, and he and Peran turned in unison to follow the King.

This wasn’t typical behavior for the King—the workshop was usually off limits until after the morning meeting with the King’s secretary, on the grounds that if it weren’t, there wouldn’t _be_ a morning meeting with the King’s secretary—but then, taking a concubine wasn’t typical for him, either, and Josiah was fairly certain the King had interrupted his work last night to do just that.  Neither deviation from normal was particularly alarming to Josy; after all, he himself frequently went months without feeling the pull of the flesh—much to the bafflement of Peran—and yet, he himself, if he had been presented with the specimen Zola had turned up with the previous night...  Well, he couldn’t say he would have turned it down.  

Almost certainly would not have, to tell the truth.

But the King _had_ been in the middle of something, something which he had only somewhat come to a stopping point on—Josiah could never really see the details, but they always involved aiding the country in some mechanical marvel or another—so it seemed likely that he would want to finish off that task today before taking breakfast and visitors.  

(Visitors had been strictly forbidden until after the King had sat to breakfast, on the grounds that the taking of breakfast was an observable, non-arguable point, and also on the grounds that it guaranteed the King had time in his schedule to eat, something the Head of Household was resolute about.)

So Josiah was expecting to have to wait a bit of a longer than usual to get to his own chambers; he wouldn’t just be waiting the half-hour while the King dined and attended to the morning correspondence, he would be waiting an additional hour or so while the King attended to whatever had been left undone the previous evening.  

But it wasn’t like this was the end of the world, or anything; there were plenty of days when Josy made it all the way out of the city and to his mother’s house before the sun rose, so getting there an hour later, while the air was still chilled but warming... that was a small price to pay.  And Josiah knew Peran wouldn’t be upset, either; he only get testy when he missed the first showing of the panto by the market, and that was hours away, still.  (Not that Peran would ever stoop so low as to display public testiness, no matter how late it was; he was like that.)

The point was, Josiah was tired; but not tired enough—not tired enough by a _long_ shot—to miss the way the King paused and stiffened when he entered the other room.  

As guards, they weren’t supposed to talk.  It was part of their order-set, drilled into them by the taskmasters, and the superior officers, and... everyone.  A King’s bodyguard was a part of the scenery, fading into the background, unobserved until the moment some fact got disputed, a witness was needed, or the other, darker reason for a bodyguard came about.  There was no function for a _mouth_ on a King’s bodyguard, not while he was on duty, not unless the king himself turned and asked him a direct question.  Everybody knew that.

But if he _had_ been at liberty to do it—if the King had been on of Josy’s few friends, and not the _King—_ he would have stepped forward, put a comforting hand on the King’s back.  Would have stepped forward again, and put himself between the King and the table, even though there was manifestly no threat present there.  And he would have said, “Your Majesty?”, his voice full of concern, because the King’s hand was trembling faintly as it stretched towards the table, and his nostrils were flaring around harsh, angry breaths.

Instead, he settled for pressing his back against the doorframe, and waiting, and watching.  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Peran doing the same.

The King stalked around the room, looking at his diagrams closely, looking, again and again, back at the map, considering it.  Something was wrong, something that bothered him, and after a moment, Josiah remembered the concubine the night before picking up the handcrafted pieces and putting them back on its surface, remembered the way the smooth edges of the wood had seemed light as the rested on the vellum, not digging in at all, although they had left groves in the concubine’s hands—he must have been gripping them tightly.  

But that wouldn’t be enough to alarm the King, surely.  There was no way for anyone, much less a concubine who obviously had no training in the matter, to discern the State’s strategy from a handful of pieces on the ground.  And, okay, there were more than a handful—maybe two score, all told—but still:  ground was ground, so that couldn’t be it.

The King kept coming back to the map, though.  The diagrams he looked at, but then set down, but the map...  He was stalking around it like a cat with a cucumber, so there had to be something wrong with it.

Eventually, the King jerked himself away, turning to leave the room again, whatever work he had been planning to complete left undone.  He paused as he stood directly between Josiah and Peran, not looking at either of them, but staring straight ahead at his desk.

“Did you see the pieces replaced?” he asked.

He still wasn’t looking at either of them.  They couldn’t say they had been asked if he didn’t make it clear who he was asking; that was the rules.  

The King _had_ to know the rules, didn’t he?

Josiah exchanged a look with Peran, both of them wide-eyed and bewildered, not sure what to do.  Peran gave a little shrug— _you decide,_ he meant.  It made sense; Peran would give his life for the king, Josiah knew, but he wasn’t going to risk his retirement for a damned _question._

Josiah bit his lip.  

He knew the answer, was the thing; he had always been more inclined to sharing the answer if he knew it.

 _Against the rules!_ shrieked his mind.

 _I know the answer, though,_ he told it.

Slowly, almost as if it were some third party controlling it, his chin sank towards his chest, then rose again.  A nod.

The King nodded in return, hand clenching into fists.  Then they released, flexing flat.  “The concubine?”

Still a question.  Still not directed.  Still against the rules to answer.

Josiah nodded again, more quickly this time.

Peran shot him a look that said he was being an idiot; Josy widened his eyes and tightened his mouth:   _What else could I do?!_

Peran huffed, and looked away.

The King turned to look at Josiah directly, seeming to study him, evaluate him carefully, as he hadn’t done since the first two weeks Josiah and Peran had been working for him.  At length, he spoke again.  “At some point,” he said slowly, now, obviously, speaking directly to Josy, “he looked at that table.  Did you see it?  How long did he look?”

Josiah thought frantically, replaying the memory of the night before.  The concubine had entered through the curtains on the heels of Zola, and had immediately looked around—like Josy’s uncle Martin, now that he thought of it.  Uncle Martin had been a commander in the King’s Guard all the way back in the King’s father’s time, and had served for twenty years.  Uncle Martin always, _always_ checked a room when he entered it.

And like Uncle Martin, the concubine had done the same:  looked around, then jerked his hands, both of them, towards his waist.  Checking for weapons, it would have been, if he had been someone who had weapons; since he was a concubine, instead, Josy wasn’t sure _what_ the gesture represented.

Then he had gaped, staring about him slack-jawed, for a minute—which Josiah could hardly blame him for, all things considered.

And then, _only then,_ had had sunk to his knees, gaze focused on the floor and not raising until after the King had scattered the pieces from the map across the ground.  

Josiah frowned.  “I didn’t see a particular look at the table,” he said slowly, “I saw a look around the room.  It touched the table, but—not for more than an instant.”  He let his gaze settle on the King’s face, and then, a second later, jerked it back down to the ground.  “Like that,” he explained.

The King nodded again, mouth thinning in mixed aggravation and satisfaction, and resumed walking, turning towards his desk, and his correspondence, and eventually his breakfast.

 

* * *

 

There were a few different kinds of business which the King would conduct.  

The Audiences, of course, were the most famous; once-weekly, and anybody with a grievance could attend.  The King would hear the grievance, and decide the judgement.  The King’s father—by all accounts, a flawed man but a good ruler—had increased the frequency of Audiences for the first time since nearly the founding of the realm; their third king, centuries ago, had set them at once monthly, but Howard had increased them to every week.  Three councillors had resigned on the spot; two of the three had later been held to charge in a grievance, though, and it was quietly agreed that the change had been a good one.  

The Council were the officials of the King’s government, and he met with them daily, in a smaller room than the grand throne room used for the Audiences.  The King’s father had used the throne room for both Audiences and Council meetings, but the current king, the one who held Josiah’s loyalty so tightly, claimed it echoed and gave him a headache.  So instead, one of the many throne room antechambers had been repurposed, a large table brought in and bench seating, and every day the King spent between two and five hours in there wrangling the Council.  

(It may have improved the echoes a bit, but Josiah knew the King still came out of them with a headache.)

The third kind of Business the King conducted was Correspondence.  This was an array of notes, passing back and forth and back and forth so often that Josiah had always wondered that the page-boys didn’t get dizzy.  They were usually abstruse, and always official—as the King, his Majesty could have no _un_ official correspondence, which, of course, didn’t particularly stop him from doing precisely that.  The King’s secretary was a down-to-earth woman of whom Josiah was frankly terrified, and she usually sorted these notes out with a bland sort of indifference to their fancy language.  It always struck him as a kind of magic, but Peran had laughed at him when Josiah said that out loud.

The fourth kind of business was the Interviews.  Face-to-face meetings, usually with those from whom the King required something:  recalcitrant nobles who were blocking a bridge being built, or consultations with the head of the King’s Wardrobe.  Even friends, such as the Commander of the Navy, were Interviews, and if Josiah were called to testify about what was said during those meetings, he would do it—and all knew it.  But mostly he was ignored, and until they were treated as formal occasions, it was understood that the Interviews were as close to relaxing with a friend as the King would ever come.

Then there were the bodyguards—of course—and the concubines; the little girl who came through in the morning to dust and tend the fire, the attendant sent by Wardrobe to try fruitlessly to dress the King in undershirts that weren’t purple.  But those were all servants, and so of course they didn’t count as people.  

Of all the people the King met with who weren’t Interviews, though, Miss Potts—the King had offered to pension her with a title on numerous occasions, but she never agreed—was Josiah’s personal favorite.  She was terrifying to all right-thinking men, but she _did_ make things much easier on the King, and Josiah bore him in enough affection that he could be grateful for that.  

She appeared every morning—this morning included—with a tray of breakfast and a plan for the day.  The mornings—except on Audience Day, and aside from the Interviews scattered through them—would be the King’s to spend as he wished, which was usually in his workroom; the afternoons he spent in Council, the evenings in Court Dinner.  The nights were his own again, and he typically spent them working at his plans and miniatures, trying to improve them that smidge, that one little bit, which would turn the tide of battle in their favor, or bring clean water to the hospital in the center of the city, or make it so that the the farmer could get his entire garden harvested before the storm hit.

It wasn’t just the army that benefitted from his inventions; Josiah had noticed that, over the months he had spent at the King’s side.

At any rate, here was Miss Potts, marching in right on schedule, a gleam in her eye and a distracted air as if she were already planning the next ten steps of the King’s day—and she probably was.  The King suffered patiently through the reading of the correspondence—she really did pare it down from what it could have been, but there were still a lot of notes that needed answering—and through the schedule for the morning—mostly his time was his own; only three Interviews and one consult with the armorer, that was hardly _anything—_

“Nope.”

Miss Potts froze, her gaze coalescing into an icy disdain which hid real frustration.  “What do you mean, _nope?_ You’re due to visit the troops on the front in one month, and I’m not going to have you do it in armor that can’t take a _beating—”_

“I mean _nope,_ first, because Toldemar is an idiot and I cannot _believe_ you were planning to send me to him, it’s like you _want_ me dead—”  He waved off the outraged, indignant look she immediately sprouted and overrode her objections.  “—and secondly, _you_ are going to have bigger fish to fry than that, because you’re going to be setting up a meeting Rhodey and Rice, and unlike Toldemar, they are not pushovers.  They’re actually pretty hard guys—did that sound wrong?  I feel like that came out wrong; Rice at least would probably resent my saying that—”

“Your Majesty.”

“What, you don’t think so?”  

And then he _waited,_ spinning out the silence until she admitted, “Okay, yes, he probably would, but—”

“I want to talk about our defenses.”

“You never want to talk about our defenses—”

“—because there’s never anything to talk about, they do an adequate job, it’s not my area, why would I bring it up?”

“Precisely, so why—”

“I’ve had an idea—well, that’s not quite—well, it kind of is.  I’ve acquired an idea, let’s say it like that, and I think it’ll work—”

“Your Majesty—”

“—and I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention it to them—”

“—your fitting is at noon—”

“—it’s a matter of state security, really—”

“—I’ll make sure Toldemar knows you’re coming—”

“Pepper!”  

She stopped.  

Looked at him.  

Closed her eyes, knowing what was coming.

His Majesty said gently, but firmly, “I’m not going to the fitting, Pepper.  Tell Rhodey and Rice to meet me here at nine tomorrow; we’ll have a lot to coordinate.”

She let her head fall back on her neck, slowly, the bells attached to the ends of the elaborate twisting braids of her hairstyle chiming softly together.  She took a deep breath in, then let it out on a sigh.  “It’s too early for this.”

“It _is_ too early for this; would you like a drink?”

“I would not like a drink—”

“Here, let me pour you some plum wine, I’m sure I’ve got some back here—”

“I don’t want plum wine, I can’t start drinking with breakfast—”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you’ve probably been up for hours.”

(She probably had.)

She rolled her eyes and repeated, “I can’t have plum wine—”

“Maybe some beer, then?”

“Your Majesty!”  

He stopped.

“I can’t have plum wine.  _Or_ beer—”  She sighed again, then smiled wryly, shook her head and finished, “—because I have to arrange a meet with the heads of the army and the navy, and their secretaries get so testy when I’m tipsy.”

The King looked down, smiling brilliantly at his lap, then controlled his expression and looked up again.  “Well, it’s probably because Rhodey and Rice don’t give out the good booze, like I do.”

“I’m sure that’s it,” she agreed, looking fondly at him.

The moment stretched, warm and cozy, like an oversized blanket that could wrap and then wrap some more around you.  Josiah felt his gaze skittering away from them, not wanting to stare at the intimacy between his king and the woman who was his second-oldest friend, tracking instead to the door, the desk, the bed, the curtains, the door again before she spoke.  

“Will that be all, your Majesty?”  Her face was clear, the mask of professionalism once more dropped over it.

Over both of their faces, in fact.  “That will be all, Miss Potts.”

She nodded and turned to leave.

“No, wait, sorry—no, actually, just—one more thing.”

She was facing Josiah and Peran, so they were probably the only ones who could see her roll her eyes.  

“I’ll need you to send a message to Zola.”

She pivoted, braids chiming together discordantly.  “Seriously?”

“What?  I had a good time last night, I’d like to do it again, set it up.”

 _“Seriously,_ your Majesty?!”

“Pepper.”

_“Now?!”_

“What?  No, after supper—wait.  Did—do you think I’m going to get my rocks off in the middle of the morning?”

She groaned and turned away—Josiah suddenly remembered the early years of the King’s reign, when he had on one occasion done just that—but no one in the entire room actually believed she wasn’t going to make it happen.  Josiah thought that was probably for the best; the King seemed to be even more alert and high-spirited than usual this morning, so it seemed like the concubine had been good for him.

**Author's Note:**

> Josiah is not neurotypical; Peran is not (quite) Deret Beshelar.


End file.
